marcwolf's blog

Anyone who has an interest in Special Effects knows who Stan Winston is. For those who don't he is one of the pioneers of special effects and creature construction. Think the Terminator , Aliens and you start to know who he is.

Lipsyncing is the process of making an animatronic costume or model mimic the actions of speaking. I use the term mimic as it is currently impossible to make an artifical tougue or larynx that will duplicate speech. So we have to use a speaker with a recorded voice and have an animatronics track to make the movements.

Real Time Lipsyncing is where you do not have the luxury of being able to record tracks and add the lipmovements. It has to be done on the fly and often whilst interacting ad-hoc with an audience.

My main interests is in advanced costumes and animatronic. For example you may have seen movies like Predator or Underworld where the actor wears a costume that has a lot of servo's in it to make that character come to life.

One could say that a costume of that complexity is basically a robot that you can wear. Especially if a lot of the emotions are preprogrammed into the costume and triggeed by outside events.